


burning up

by GenericUsername01



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Assumptions, Blackmail, Drug Addiction, Drug Withdrawal, M/M, Manipulation, Medical Trauma, Muteness, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-10 05:26:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15942686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GenericUsername01/pseuds/GenericUsername01
Summary: The thing about an addiction is that it destroys you completely, leaves you with absolutely nothing left and no line you wouldn't cross to get that next hit.Moriarty knew from the very beginning that he could turn Sherlock into an obedient lapdog completely at his mercy, at his beck and call, with just one simple injection.





	1. Relapse

It's a week after the pool bombing. John is at Harry's, who called him sobbing, drunk, and quite possibly in a very dangerous place. He might not be back for a few days. Sherlock hummed indifferently when he said that, and then made a weak effort at convincing him not to go. John called him an arsehole.

It's one of the rare occasions he's willingly asleep at a reasonable hour, and in his own bed, no less, not passed out on the couch or at the table from sheer exhaustion like usual.

He wakes up to a slap across his face. Moriarty's eyes gleam at him in the dark.

Before he can react, a needle has been shoved into his arm and the plunger depressed with a hiss. Sherlock breathes in sharply, feeling that familiar rush as the cocaine hits his system.

Moriarty grins, cups his chin, and gives him a kiss. He gives a short little wave and a smirk, and then he's gone, out the door and disappearing, and horrible, magnificent dread fills Sherlock's veins.

* * *

Lestrade has a crack team, the best in the force, and he's damn proud of that fact. Most days.

Today is not one of those days.

Anderson and Donovan are on the outs again and not speaking to each other, Hopkins is still right pissed over the Peter Carey case, and John Watson has work at the surgery today, which means they'll have to deal with Sherlock without him.

Greg quickly realizes that not a single one of these four young adults are going to be speaking to each other and he sighed. Some days, he feels like a preschool teacher, supervising kindergarteners. He knows his team is full of fully qualified, professional adults, every last one of them at the top of their field. But then there are days like this, with silence and passive-aggression and petty, frankly teenage drama, and he wonders.

And god, Sherlock hasn't even gotten here yet, and he's always in a horribly stroppy mood without John, and Hopkins punching him is a legitimate possibility. He had gone from 'Sherlock's protege' to 'just another idiot cop, and a shoddy one at that' in the span of one case. The kid had not enjoyed being made to look like a fool and a bad cop by the detective he had a small amount of hero worship for. And arresting the wrong man out of essentially laziness was not good for one's career. It would be a long time now before he was promoted to sergeant.

To make the day worse, it's not even nine in the morning before they get a call about a child murder.

Lestrade sends a quick text to Sherlock before hopping in a police car with Donovan and heading toward the Thames.

Sherlock Holmes shows up ten minutes late in a designer suit, hair unwashed and looking like he hasn't slept or eaten in days. Unfortunately, a legitimate possibility. Greg is almost surprised he dragged himself away from whatever interesting case he has to come help out at the Yard. Maybe he had just solved it?

The victim is a young girl, approximately 8-10 years old, blonde, white, suspected Down Syndrome, wearing a silver necklace that said 'Rosie' on it. She appears to have been overdosed on prescription medications and then fell in the river. The coroner then reports that she wasn't quite dead yet when she went in, and the actual cause of death is drowning.

"Seems a simple enough case," Sherlock said.

"An eight year old with a drug overdose? She probably got into a family member's pill bottle and then wandered off. The whole thing looks like an accident," Anderson said.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "That dress is clearly the nicest bit of clothing in the girl's entire wardrobe, her hair was done up quite nicely before she got tossed in, yet she's wearing no shoes. The whole thing is obviously ceremonial. The medications she overdosed on were pentosan polysulphate and astemizole, both of which have been used experimentally to treat Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the UK. Neither have shown much success, or any, and astemizole has been outlawed due to its fatal side effects. Apparently whoever was using it didn't care. Creutzfeldt-Jakob is fatal too, often giving patients less than a year to live after diagnosis. So you see? Obvious."

"What?" Anderson asked. "You didn't explain anything."

Sherlock looked at him in genuine confusion. "Yes I did. I just solved it."

"No, no you didn't. You rambled on about illegal drugs for a bit, and that's it," Anderson said.

"Creutzfeldt-Jakob..." Hopkins said. "Isn't that mad cow disease? I'm pretty sure that's mad cow disease."

"Oh for the love of god," Donovan said. "He's saying it was a mercy killing. Rosie was killed by her own parent. They got a fatal diagnosis, less than a year to live, and decided to kill their daughter over it."

"Precisely," Sherlock said. "Likely a single parent with little to no social supports, and none that could be relied on to take young Rosie in. Rather than leave her to the system, her parent decided to kill her, likely believing that no one else would provide adequate care and she would be doomed to life of suffering otherwise. They dress Rosie up in her finest, braid her hair elaborately, and then give her two whole bottles of pills. Overdose is messy, it's unpleasant, there's thrashing and seizing and vomiting. Rosie is in agony. Parent likely didn't expect that. They take her down to the Thames and hold her head under until she's well and truly dead. Push the body out in the river, giving their daughter a proper burial at sea, and she washes up on the banks for us to find, what, maybe... five? Six days later?"

"Coroner says four," Lestrade said grimly. "She... looks like that from the overdose."

"Ah," Sherlock said. He clapped his hands together briskly. "Well! That's that, then, another case solved and I guess my work here is done."

"The hell are you talking about, Freak? There's still a murderer out there somewhere," Donovan said. "Assuming they didn't kill themselves right after. Even if they did, that means there's another unreported body somewhere. We still don't know who Rosie actually is, who her next of kin is, who needs to be notified to come in and identify the body."

"There have been no missing person reports fitting Rosie's description this week. She and her parent had absolutely no familial support, clearly. She was likely homeschooled and had no friends, and presumably, neither did her parent, at least none close enough to notice them going missing. Her care was a full-time job. Her parent likely quit any work they did upon receiving their diagnosis. Absolutely no one is looking for either of them. No one misses them. There is no one to notify. A child as isolated as Rosie was won't even have a funeral, because there's no one to attend."

The group went silent.

"Get out," Donovan said. "Get out right now. She's a  _little girl,_ Holmes, and if you can't even pretend to care, then we don't want you here."

He grinned sharkishly. "Marvelous."

He spun on his heel, coat swooshing out behind him, and stalked off to hail a cab.

* * *

John wasn't back yet when Sherlock returned to 221B, and he wouldn't be for hours yet. Sherlock paced the livingroom in agitation, scratching at his elbow.

He paced. He tugged at his own hair. He played angry screeching on the violin. He made toast. He poured acid on the toast. He threw the toast away.

He paced.

He went to Tesco's, bought a new teapot, walked outside until he found a dead pigeon, went back home and boiled the pigeon. Pigeon tea.

He put it in a jar and preserved it, then shoved the jar in the very back of a cupboard. Who knows how long it would be before John found the thing and threw it out.

Maybe Sherlock would throw it out.

He paced.

He kicked the couch and when that wasn't satisfying enough, he started tearing at it, with his hands and then with a knife. He threw the knife at random and it sailed across the room until it bounced off the fridge harmlessly.

Sherlock kicked the fridge. He pulled his hair some more.

He paced.

It was now 1:03, twenty-seven minutes since he last checked two minutes ago, he swore.

He sat cross-legged on the floor and bit his lip, worrying at it with his teeth until it bled. He was calm. He was calm.

He slammed his fists down on his legs over and over and when that wasn't good enough, he stood up and threw his arm at the corner of the fridge repeatedly, always the same place, hitting it so hard that it started to bruise instantly. His arm would be dark and mottled by tomorrow.

He walked out of the flat to go find the nearest cocaine dealer and buy as much as he could afford.


	2. Threat

Not one single drug dealer within a ten-block radius of 221B would sell to him. Some seemed genuinely terrified that he even asked, which generally translated to Sherlock being threatened with guns and knives and told to go the fuck away. Even dealers he was certain he had never dealt with before—never even met before—refused to have anything to do with him.

Ten blocks in every direction. Twelve. Fifteen.

Sherlock headed back to the flat, positively fuming.

Moriarty was sitting in his chair, smirking and holding a small bag of white powder. Sherlock’s stomach dropped.

“Hi honey,” he crooned. “Did you miss me?”

“It hasn’t even been a day,” Sherlock growled.

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not trying to kill you. I just want to make sure you’re well and truly relapsed,” he said. “Besides. You would have used today anyway.”

 _Maybe not,_ he thought petulantly. Maybe he was just going to buy some to have on hand, for later, just in case.

“Anyway, roll your sleeve up,” Moriarty said, suddenly bored.

“No.”

He looked up. He grinned and pulled out his phone, pulling up a video. He tossed it across the room at Sherlock, who caught it easily.

A video was playing. Molly Hooper was on the screen, looking up at the camera and smiling, chatting. It was angled down at her from maybe six inches up. She looked directly at it.

A glasses cam.

Sherlock’s heart sank.

He rolled up his sleeve numbly, and all he could think was that Molly Hooper really should stop dating, for the sake of humanity, if not her own safety. He tied a band around his arm, located a vein, stabbed a needle into it and depressed the plunger. Heat filled his blood as the cocaine rushed through him.

Moriarty smiled and pulled him down for another kiss, to fast for Sherlock to react properly in the state he was in. He waved and headed to the door.

“Oh, one last thing,” he said. “The threat still stands if you take the Langer case.”

* * *

 

The Langer case did not exist for two more days. Then Lestrade came by the flat.

“We’ve got a disappearance,” he said. “A missing person. Rebecca Langer. Friends called her Becky.”

“Hm. Probably a runaway.”

“She really isn’t.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes.

“She had no reason to run away, Sherlock. Good family, lots of friends, finances all sorted. No ties to anything suspicious at all.”

“A lover. There’s always a lover.”

“No, not this time.”

“A _secret_ lover, Lestrade, that’s why she ran away. God.”

“She didn’t have a secret lover, Sherlock.”

“That’s what they all say,” he said. “Even if she didn’t, there’s nothing for me to solve about teenage rebellion.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I’m not asking you to then, isn’t it? Becky Langer is 82.”

“What?” he asked, sitting up.

Lestrade smirked. “She’s 82. Her husband died ten years ago after a marriage of 47 years. So I’m reasonably confident there was no secret lover, and this was not teenage rebellion.”

Sherlock willed himself not to look too interested. He’s never heard of an old lady going missing, it simply doesn’t happen, and now he can’t even work the case. “Still. Missing person, quite ordinary. Barely a two.”

“Oh? And I suppose you’ve solved it then, have you?” Lestrade asked, folding his arms.

“Surely you can figure this one out on your own?”

“Humor me,” he said. “What are your theories?”

_Moriarty._

“Suicide,” he said. “You’re looking for a body.”

He frowned. “There was no history of depression.”

“People _lie,_ Lestrade. They deceive, they act, they put on a show to protect the ones they love,” he said. “When someone is trying to cover up something that other people don’t want to see in the first place, you’d be surprised how much can be hidden.”

* * *

 

Four hours later, left an experiment in the kitchen to go snatch up a textbook to use as reference. But when he entered the livingroom, his eyes went straight to a cardboard box sitting on the window ledge, a piece of paper taped to its lid.

He pried open the window and snatched up the box.

_A reward for being so good._

_XOXO, Jim_

He crumpled it up and threw it down into the street below.

Inside the box was a hypodermic needle, filled with ten milligrams of fluid. If Moriarty followed his pattern, it would be a 7% solution of pure cocaine. Or it could be something else entirely, something lethal, and Sherlock would have no way of knowing.

He could test it. He had the equipment. It would be useful information.

It would give him something to do other than shoot up, too.

Forty-five minutes and three microscope slides later, Sherlock had determined that the needle held exactly what it looked like. Cocaine. Pure, refined, no fillers or narcotics, 7% solution. Perfect.

He put the needle back in the box and stared at it.

* * *

 

It may have been twenty minutes or twenty hours. Eventually he got up and left to go to the bathroom. And then he took an hour long shower. He played symphonies on the violin into the early morning hours, and then worked on composing his own pieces. He cut up a corpse’s leg, peeling off the skin and making into neatly-cut squares. He exposed each square to a flame of a different heat and duration to see what type of burns would form.

John came back, overnight bag in hand. He stared at the kitchen table, covered in a makeshift quilt of burned flesh.

“Should I be worried about what you deemed bad enough to keep hidden?” he asked, indicating the cardboard box.

“Maggots,” Sherlock said, not looking up. “Don’t open it, they’ll go everywhere. I can’t have them chewing on my experiment.”

“Ah,” he said, moving away and giving the box—the table—a wide berth. “Well, what have you been up to? Any interesting cases?”

“No,” he said. “Nothing interesting at all.”


	3. The Crash

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm genuinely sorry. Just stop reading this fic right now and do yourself a favor. I can't believe I'm publishing this.

Moriarty stops by three times the next week and four the week after that, always when John isn’t home. The flat begins to feel like a prison.

He haunts the morgue and attempts to tell Molly that her new boyfriend is gay again, but she doesn’t believe him this time, mainly because Sherlock has never met him and has no deductions to offer, save for his height and the fact that he wears glasses. It’s frustrating.

She continues to date ‘Liam.’

John comments on Sherlock’s newly increased sex drive and decreased desire for sleep and food, but doesn’t notice any other signs. A lot of Sherlock’s innate personality traits resemble the effects of cocaine, and he has a great deal of experience in hiding the more obvious tells. He doesn’t make eye contact, he shies away from touch outside of sex, where his elevated pulse will be expected.

Sherlock has always been prone to periods of agitation or contemplation. He has always been insufferably arrogant and thought himself invincible. It’s not particular unexpected for him to overestimate his abilities on occasion. And if he shoots the wall a bit more and seems generally more _Sherlock-y_ than usual, well, he’s bored. He’s been refusing so many cases lately, claiming they’re all too dull.

And John may be a doctor but he isn’t enough of an expert on narcotics to tell the difference between regular Sherlock and Sherlock on cocaine. He just seems a bit manic, a bit aggressive, even more convinced of his own superiority than usual.

And frankly, John likes the additional sex.

So no, he doesn’t notice that his boyfriend has relapsed.

When someone is trying to cover up something that other people don’t want to see in the first place, you’d be surprised how much can be hidden.

* * *

 

It comes to a head eventually, of course, because John isn’t an idiot and this was Moriarty’s plan, after all: to ruin Sherlock’s life.

A day passes without a visit from Moriarty, not particularly unusual. Then another. Another. A fourth. And Sherlock is in withdrawal, gone cold turkey without any support at all, without even planning on it or anticipating it.

Everything was so slow and dull and gray. He couldn’t process his thoughts at a normal speed. He was bone-tired, exhausted, but whenever he slept he had night terrors realer than life. The ability to feel any joy or pleasure had gone away completely, and life wasn’t worth living any more. Without that glorious high, why would it be? All the effects of cocaine backfired in reverse. He was starving, pathetic, so slow and weak, he didn’t want to do anything but sleep, maybe forever.

Yes. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? To go to sleep and never wake. A dreamless sleep, though, it would have to be. If Sherlock had to suffer another psychological torment under the guise of a nightmare, he would cry. He had reached that point yesterday, actually.

Last time he went into withdrawal, it had lasted three weeks. Cocaine withdrawal is almost purely psychological. It had been exacerbated for far longer than it needed to be by stress, years of prolonged use, Sherlock’s special variety of mental issues, and the final overdose that had led to Lestrade holding him captive in his house until he got clean.

He has a vague hope that maybe it won’t be so bad this time, but deep down, he knows it will be.

Some people use low-dose cocaine just once and get over withdrawal in a week or some such nonsense. Sherlock doesn’t understand, but he knows his mind betrays him at this time, turns against him and draws out the pain.

Everything. Is. So. Gray.

He feels like sobbing.

John has noticed the change, this one at least, and he made Sherlock an appointment with a therapist two weeks out. It won’t do any good, but John is concerned about his boyfriend’s seeming ‘depression.’

Sherlock curls up into a ball on the couch, facing the wall and shunning the entire world. He maybe sleeps, he maybe doesn’t. But eventually he hears the sound of the door opening and someone walking into the livingroom.

He’s so out of it he doesn’t even realize those aren’t John’s footsteps.

“Oh, poor Sherly,” Moriarty croons. “I’ve been neglecting you, haven’t I, baby? Let’s see, day four, and withdrawal should be about ten days? You’re smack dab in the middle then, aren’t you? Oh, poor baby. Here, I brought a treat for you. It’s fifteen milligrams of your very favorite solution.”

Sherlock snapped upright on the couch, eyes wide, face set in stone. He scrambled for the needle, but Moriarty held it high in the air and Sherlock stumbled over his own feet and fell, somehow.

“Ah, ah, ah,” Moriarty tsked. “Ain’t nothing in this world free, Sherly dear. You have to know that. I want something first.”

“What?” he asked, unable to hide his impatience, sparing himself no dignity.

He smiled affectionately. “I want you to get on your knees and blow me.”

Sherlock recoiled, and Moriarty laughed. “Come on, Sherly, it’s not like it’ll be the first time you’ve done it. And if you don’t, then I suppose you won’t mind if I just destroy this little needle and flush its contents, will you?”

“No!” he said. “No, don’t. I—” he swallowed. “I’ll do it.”

Because the thing was, Moriarty was right. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d blown someone in exchange for a hit. The fact that it was Moriarty was… inconsequential. A dealer was a dealer, in the end.

John! John would—

John would never know.

And the next thing Sherlock knew, he was undoing Moriarty’s fly and pushing his underwear down.

He was quick and efficient, because as stated, he knew what he was doing. He used every trick he had ever learned. Part of him rebelled at the idea of making this so pleasurable for this man, but a larger part of him wanted to get it over as quickly as possible.

Moriarty was just about to finish when John walked in.

Sherlock didn’t notice. He just continued what he was doing, simultaneously hyperaware of every sensation and also completely out of it, distancing himself mentally. He didn’t hear the door open and close or John’s quiet gasp, and if he had, he likely would have attributed it to Moriarty, who was moaning loudly in pleasure.

He threaded his fingers through Sherlock’s hair and then tightened his grip, holding him in place for the finishing thrusts. Sherlock relaxed his jaw and sucked, swallowing rapidly.

He pulled off and Moriarty smiled and kissed him sweetly, licking a stray drop from his lower lip.

“Bye bye, darling. See you soon,” he said, waltzing out. Sherlock tracked his movement.

And then he saw John standing there, mouth agape, horrified.


End file.
